The 100 best novels: No 50 – Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925) | Books | The Guardian The 100 best novels The 100 best novels: No 50 – Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925) Woolf's great novel makes a day of party preparations the canvas for themes of lost love, life choices and mental illness 'What is this terror? What is this ecstasy?' Virginia Woolf takes on the big questions in Mrs Dalloway. Photograph: Central Press/Getty Images Share on Messenger Close In the spring of 1924, Virginia Woolf , then in her 40s, gave a famous lecture, later published as the essay Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown, in which she declared that "we are trembling on the verge of one of the great ages of English literature". She might have been speaking about herself. In the next 15-odd years, before her suicide, Woolf would transform the English literary landscape forever.

She would innovate (To the Lighthouse); she would flirt (Orlando); she would provoke (A Room of One's Own) and, privately, would dazzle herself and her friends with a stream of letters (and diaries), all of which reveal a writer's mind at full tilt. Woolf is one of the giants of this series, and Mrs Dalloway, her fourth novel, is one of her greatest achievements, a book whose afterlife continues to inspire new generations of writers and readers. Like Ulysses (no 46 in this series), it takes place in the course of a single day, probably 13 June 1923. Unlike Joyce's masterpiece, Woolf's female protagonist is an upper-class English woman living in Westminster who is planning a party for her husband, a mid-level Tory politician. As Clarissa Dalloway's day unfolds, in and around Mayfair, we discover that not only is she being treated in Harley Street for severe depression, a familiar subject to Woolf, but she also conceals a troubled past replete with unarticulated love and suggestions of lesbianism.

Equally troubled is the novel's second main character, explicitly a "double", a Great War veteran who fought in France "to save an England which consisted almost entirely of Shakespeare's plays". Septimus Warren Smith is suffering from shell shock and is on his way to a consultation with Clarissa's psychiatrist. Mingled with the preparations for the party, the stream-of-consciousness exploration of Mrs Dalloway's inner state is broken by an irruption of senseless violence when Septimus, who is waiting to be taken to an asylum, throws himself out of a window. News of Septimus's suicide becomes a topic of conversation at Mrs Dalloway's party, where Woolf indicates Clarissa's deep sympathy for the dead man's suffering. The novel ends unresolved, but on a note of suspenseful menace. "What is this terror?" writes Woolf. "What is this ecstasy?" Her mature work would be devoted to exploring these questions. A note on the text Mrs Dalloway, published by the Hogarth Press with a striking Vanessa Bell dust jacket on 14 May 1925, was a novel that grew out of two previous short stories, Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street and The Prime Minister.

The latter makes his appearance at the party at the end of the novel. Clarissa also appeared in Woolf's first novel, The Voyage Out, as well as in five of her short stories. Mrs Dalloway's literary influence can be seen in Michael Cunningham's The Hours and perhaps also in Ian McEwan's novel Saturday, which takes place on a single day, 15 February 2003. Three more from Virginia Woolf To the Lighthouse (1927); Orlando (1928); A Room of One's Own (1929). SparkNotes: Mrs. Dalloway: Context Mrs. Dalloway Table of Contents Plot Overview Virginia Woolf, the English novelist, critic, and essayist, was born on January 25, 1882, to Leslie Stephen, a literary critic, and Julia Duckworth Stephen. Woolf grew up in an upper-middle-class, socially active, literary family in Victorian London. She had three full siblings, two half-brothers, and two half-sisters. She was educated at home, becoming a voracious reader of the books in her father’s extensive library.

Tragedy first afflicted the family when Woolf’s mother died in 1895, then hit again two years later, when her half-sister, Stella, the caregiver in the Stephen family, died. Woolf experienced her first bout of mental illness after her mother’s death, and she suffered from mania and severe depression for the rest of her life. Patriarchal, repressive Victorian society did not encourage women to attend universities or to participate in intellectual debate. Nonetheless, Woolf began publishing her first essays and reviews after 1904, the year her father died and she and her siblings moved to the Bloomsbury area of London. Young students and artists, drawn to the vitality and intellectual curiosity of the Stephen clan, congregated on Thursday evenings to share their views about the world. The Bloomsbury group, as Woolf and her friends came to be called, disregarded the constricting taboos of the Victorian era, and such topics as religion, sex, and art fueled the talk at their weekly salons. They even discussed homosexuality, a subject that shocked many of the group’s contemporaries. For Woolf, the group served as the undergraduate education that society had denied her.

The Voyage Out, Woolf’s first novel, was published in 1915, three years after her marriage to Leonard Woolf, a member of the Bloomsbury group. Their partnership furthered the group’s intellectual ideals. With Leonard, Woolf founded Hogarth Press, which published Sigmund Freud, Katherine Mansfield, T. S. Eliot, and other notable authors. She determinedly pursued her own writing as well: During the next few years, Woolf kept a diary and wrote several novels, a collection of short stories, and numerous essays. She struggled, as she wrote, to both deal with her bouts of bipolarity and to find her true voice as a writer. Before World War I, Woolf viewed the realistic Victorian novel, with its neat and linear plots, as an inadequate form of expression. Her opinion intensified after the war, and in the 1920s she began searching for the form that would reflect the violent contrasts and disjointed impressions of the world around her. In Mrs. Dalloway, published in 1925, Woolf discovered a new literary form capable of expressing the new realities of postwar England.

The novel depicts the subjective experiences and memories of its central characters over a single day in post–World War I London. Divided into parts, rather than chapters, the novel's structure highlights the finely interwoven texture of the characters' thoughts. Critics tend to agree that Woolf found her writer’s voice with this novel. At forty-three, she knew her experimental style was unlikely to be a popular success but no longer felt compelled to seek critical praise. The novel did, however, gain a measure of commercial and critical success. This book, which focuses on commonplace tasks, such as shopping, throwing a party, and eating dinner, showed that no act was too small or too ordinary for a writer’s attention. Ultimately, Mrs. Dalloway transformed the novel as an art form. Woolf develops the book’s protagonist, Clarissa Dalloway, and myriad other characters by chronicling their interior thoughts with little pause or explanation, a style referred to as stream of consciousness. Several central characters and more than one hundred minor characters appear in the text, and their thoughts spin out like spider webs. Sometimes the threads of thought cross—and people succeed in communicating. More often, however, the threads do not cross, leaving the characters isolated and alone.

Woolf believed that behind the “cotton wool” of life, as she terms it in her autobiographical collection of essays Moments of Being (1941), and under the downpour of impressions saturating a mind during each moment, a pattern exists. Characters in Mrs. Dalloway occasionally perceive life’s pattern through a sudden shock, or what Woolf called a “moment of being.” Suddenly the cotton wool parts, and a person sees reality, and his or her place in it, clearly. “In the vast catastrophe of the European war,” wrote Woolf, “our emotions had to be broken up for us, and put at an angle from us, before we could allow ourselves to feel them in poetry or fiction.” These words appear in her essay collection, The Common Reader, which was published just one month before Mrs. Dalloway. Her novel attempts to uncover fragmented emotions, such as desperation or love, in order to find, through “moments of being,” a way to endure. While writing Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf reread the Greek classics along with two new modernist writers, Marcel Proust and James Joyce.

Woolf shared these writers' interest in time and psychology, and she incorporated these issues into her novel. She wanted to show characters in flux, rather than static, characters who think and emote as they move through space, who react to their surroundings in ways that mirrored actual human experience. Rapid political and social change marked the period between the two world wars: the British Empire, for which so many people had sacrificed their lives to protect and preserve, was in decline. Countries like India were beginning to question Britain’s colonial rule. At home, the Labour Party, with its plans for economic reform, was beginning to challenge the Conservative Party, with its emphasis on imperial business interests. Women, who had flooded the workforce to replace the men who had gone to war, were demanding equal rights. Men, who had seen unspeakable atrocities in the first modern war, were questioning the usefulness of class-based sociopolitical institutions. Woolf lent her support to the feminist movement in her nonfiction book A Room of One’s Own (1929), as well as in numerous essays, and she was briefly involved in the women’s suffrage movement. Although Mrs.

Dalloway portrays the shifting political atmosphere through the characters Peter Walsh, Richard Dalloway, and Hugh Whitbread, it focuses more deeply on the charged social mood through the characters Septimus Warren Smith and Clarissa Dalloway. Woolf delves into the consciousness of Clarissa, a woman who exists largely in the domestic sphere, to ensure that readers take her character seriously, rather than simply dismiss her as a vain and uneducated upper-class wife. In spite of her heroic and imperfect effort in life, Clarissa, like every human being and even the old social order itself, must face death. Woolf’s struggles with mental illness gave her an opportunity to witness firsthand how insensitive medical professionals could be, and she critiques their tactlessness in Mrs. Dalloway. One of Woolf’s doctors suggested that plenty of rest and rich food would lead to a full recovery, a cure prescribed in the novel, and another removed several of her teeth. In the early twentieth century, mental health problems were too often considered imaginary, an embarrassment, or the product of moral weakness. During one bout of illness, Woolf heard birds sing like Greek choruses and King Edward use foul language among some azaleas.

In 1941, as England entered a second world war, and at the onset of another breakdown she feared would be permanent, Woolf placed a large stone in her pocket to weigh herself down and drowned herself in the River Ouse. More Help Mrs. Dalloway. Mrs. Dalloway. First Edition of Virginia Woolfs Mrs. Dalloway; In the Scarce Dust Jacket Mrs. Dalloway. Item Number: 3229 New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1925. First American edition of Woolf’s great modernist novel. Octavo, original cloth. Small name and date of 1925 on the front free endpaper, near fine in a very good dust jacket with a few small chips to the crown and a chip to the front panel. Housed in a custom half morocco clamshell box. Rare in the original dust jacket. "In Mrs. Dalloway Woolf breaks decisively with the fictional conventions of the realistic novel.

The technique is almost orchestral, introducing and then interweaving the strains of the different characters thoughts, and finally engineering, through a subtle sequence of readjustments and realignments, a new and delicate harmony between them at the close of the book. Mrs. Dalloway thus initiated Woolfs sequence of radical experiments with literary form, embodying a striking combination of fluid sympathy and secret resistance. Through the novels rapid transitions between apparently disconnected, but secretly related stories, Woolf was able to suggest the hazards of neatly pigeonholing human character according to social situation or gender" (Parker, 110-11). Out of stock Mrs. Dalloway | novel by Woolf | Britannica.com novel by Woolf Mrs. Dalloway, novel by Virginia Woolf , published in 1925. The novel, which examines one day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, an upper-class Londoner married to a member of Parliament, is essentially plotless; what action there is takes place mainly in the characters’ consciousness . The novel addresses the nature of time in personal experience through two interwoven stories, that of Mrs.

Dalloway, preparing for a party, and that of the mentally damaged war veteran Septimus Warren Smith. While never abandoning her omniscient third-person voice, Woolf enters the consciousness of seemingly unconnected characters and brings their feelings to the surface. The characters are connected, and the narrative shifts from one to another, by means of shared public experiences, such as an exhibition of skywriting. Learn More in these related articles: in English literature: The literature of World War I and the interwar period ...women gaining positions of influence, even though she set out the desirability of this in her feminist study Three Guineas (1938). Together with Joyce, who greatly influenced her Mrs. Dalloway (1925), Woolf transformed the treatment of subjectivity, time, and history in fiction and helped create a feeling among her contemporaries that traditional forms of... in Virginia Woolf: Major period In Mrs. Dalloway (1925), the boorish doctors presume to understand personality, but its essence evades them.

This novel is as patterned as a Post-Impressionist painting but is also so accurately representational that the reader can trace Clarissa’s and Septimus’s movements through the streets of London on a single day in June 1923. At the end of the day, Clarissa gives... 3 References found in Britannica Articles Assorted References Corrections? Updates? Help us improve this article! Contact our editors with your feedback. MEDIA FOR: You have successfully emailed this. Error when sending the email. Try again later. Edit Mode Submit Tips For Editing We welcome suggested improvements to any of our articles. You can make it easier for us to review and, hopefully, publish your contribution by keeping a few points in mind. Encyclopædia Britannica articles are written in a neutral objective tone for a general audience. You may find it helpful to search within the site to see how similar or related subjects are covered. Any text you add should be original, not copied from other sources. At the bottom of the article, feel free to list any sources that support your changes, so that we can fully understand their context. (Internet URLs are the best.) Your contribution may be further edited by our staff, and its publication is subject to our final approval.

Unfortunately, our editorial approach may not be able to accommodate all contributions. Submit Thank You for Your Contribution! Our editors will review what you've submitted, and if it meets our criteria, we'll add it to the article. Please note that our editors may make some formatting changes or correct spelling or grammatical errors, and may also contact you if any clarifications are needed. Uh Oh There was a problem with your submission. Please try again later. Close Date Published: April 24, 2014 URL: Access Date: January 04, 2017 Share Mrs. Dalloway. Mrs. Dalloway. First American Edition of Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway; In the Rare Original Dust Jacket Mrs. Dalloway. Item Number: 2920 New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1925. First American edition. Octavo, original orange cloth. Light rubbing to the bottom cloth, near fine in a near fine dust jacket with a small chips. One of the nicest examples of this title we have seen. "In Mrs. Dalloway Woolf breaks decisively with the fictional conventions of the realistic novel.

The technique is almost orchestral, introducing and then interweaving the strains of the different characters’ thoughts, and finally engineering, through a subtle sequence of readjustments and realignments, a new and delicate harmony between them at the close of the book. Mrs. Dalloway thus initiated Woolf’s sequence of radical experiments with literary form, embodying a striking combination of fluid sympathy and secret resistance. Through the novel’s rapid transitions between apparently disconnected, but secretly related stories, Woolf was able to suggest the hazards of neatly pigeonholing human character according to social situation or gender" (Parker, 110-11). Add to cart Virginia Woolf: Mrs Dalloway - London Fictions London Fictions Virginia Woolf: 'Mrs Dalloway' - 1925 =Anne Fernald= Virginia Woolf This article was first posted at The Awl and is reposted here with the author's kind permission. Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, published in 1925, is set on a single day in London in June 1923.

It tells the parallel stories of Clarissa Dalloway, who is throwing a party, and Septimus Warren Smith, a shell-shocked World War One veteran. A perfect high modernist work, here are some of the reasons why the book still matters. Woolf makes us care about a fancy middle-aged lady throwing a party. From the opening line of the book — 'Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.' — we know we are with a married woman who is rich enough to have people around her to do errands for her. If most of us need flowers, there is no one to tell; Mrs. Dalloway has maids. Some people confuse Virginia Woolf with Mrs. Dalloway, but it’s more accurate to say that Mrs. Dalloway represents the world that Woolf’s mother (who died when Woolf was just thirteen) imagined for her, a conservative, social world that Woolf left behind for art, feminism, and Bloomsbury.

In asking us to empathize with Clarissa even while she shows us that Clarissa is a shallow, silly woman who has little to show for her fifty-two years, Woolf returns to all she rejected and finds the possibility that even the people she most rebelled against have souls, have regrets, and have ways of living with courage in spite of it all. Vanessa Bell's design for the novel's original dust jacket The characters have great names that have interesting histories. Clarissa shares her name with both the heroine of Samuel Richardson’s 1747-8 novel and the character who, in Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock (1711-14) provides the scissors to cut off (thus, “rape”) the lock of Belinda’s hair. In early 1925, just after finishing Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf wrote an essay on The Rape of the Lock, in which she compared Pope to Chekhov. Thus, Clarissa Dalloway, whom we see with her sewing scissors and who seems virginal in spite of marriage and motherhood, is associated with both the accessory to a satiric “rape” and the most famous rape victim in the history of the novel.

Septimus’s name seems weirder to us now than it once did. In large Victorian families, the parents of seventh-born children occasionally threw up their hands and began numbering their offspring. Woolf’s brother’s nanny in the early 1920’s was a seventh-born child, Daisy Selwood, nicknamed Septima. And, in the large blended family of Leslie Stephen and Julia Duckworth Stephen, Woolf herself was the seventh-born child. It’s a great example of a novel set on a single day. Woolf was famously unable to appreciate Joyce’s Ulysses, calling it an “underbred” book. However, three years later, in Mrs. Dalloway she tried the same experiment. The verbal pyrotechnics of Woolf’s novel are different (see below), but the tolling of Big Ben’s bells marks the hours throughout the novel and, like Joyce, Woolf uses modernist techniques to offer us glimpses of the thoughts and memories of characters who only exist for a single day. The Hours was an early title for Mrs. Dalloway and the finished novel does not have chapters, but section breaks.

Those section breaks have been plagued with errors since the first printing, where several section breaks fell at the bottom of a page and thus became invisible. However, if you follow Woolf’s instructions, the novel has exactly twelve sections, hardly a random number for a daylong novel. The longest section begins at noon. Woolf deploys allusions to Shakespeare like a master. There are a lot of allusions in Woolf, and a lot of them are easy to miss. When you get them, however, they deepen the story. One of the main ways that we learn to see Clarissa as a kind and sympathetic person is through a literary coincidence: although she never meets Septimus, both characters take comfort in the same song from Shakespeare’s somewhat obscure late romance, Cymbeline: 'Fear no more the heat of the sun / Nor the furious winter’s rages.' This dirge, sung over the body of an apparently dead boy (but really a living girl) connects the living woman to the soon-dead man. Other allusions to Shakespeare are similarly calculated to exercise your inner English major.

Woolf plays with gender roles again when Clarissa remembers her love for Sally Seton when they were younger by quoting Othello, upon first reuniting with Desdemona: 'if it were now to die ‘twere now to be most happy.' We can guess that Septimus’ volunteering for war will be ill fated when he associates his love for his teacher, Miss Isabel Pole with Antony and Cleopatra, and not, say Twelfth Night. And finally, Lady Bruton, who should have been a general, gets to quote Richard II while Woolf simultaneously takes pleasure in and makes fun of her patriotism: 'this isle of men, this dear, dear land, was in her blood (without reading Shakespeare).' It continues to inspire other works of art. Toni Morrison wrote her M.A. thesis on Woolf and Faulkner and you can see a direct link between Septimus and Shadrack, the WWI veteran and founder of National Suicide day in Sula. Gregoire Bouillier’s memoir The Mystery Guest (appropriately tongue-in-cheek trailer here ), set around one of performance artist Sophie Calle’s birthday parties, has the Bouillier and Calle’s mutual admiration for Mrs.

Dalloway as a central conceit. Michael Cunningham’s The Hours and the movie of the same name are really lovely tributes to the book. The Laura Brown section, about a discontented housewife reading Mrs. Dalloway, Doris Lessing-style, alone in a hotel room, is particularly smart and made so much better when linked to the novel. And, although Ian McEwan would rather have you think of him with Bellow and Mailer, his Saturday, about a wealthy surgeon whose spends the day getting ready for a party under the shadow of 9/11, is, of course, a retelling of Mrs. Dalloway. It’s full of London history. Richard Dalloway tsk-tsks the terrible traffic at Piccadilly Circus, and in doing so, he records an ongoing London problem of the time. In fact, buses, hand- and horse-drawn carts, carriages, automobiles and pedestrians all competed to cross streets at a time when traffic signals still had to be changed manually by a traffic officer.

Traffic in Piccadilly especially was the subject of many newspaper articles and resulted in multiple government committees, studies and reports during the early 1920’s—committees of just the kind that Richard, as a Member of Parliament might sit on. This 1927 film clip offers a sense of the traffic. Early in the novel, the driver of the mysterious car on Bond Street waves an ivory disk and escapes another traffic jam. Such passes are now largely forgotten, but were once a common perk for railway directors and other people of privilege. You can see one such ivory disk, a coach pass, here . . Devonshire House in the 1890s When Clarissa shops at Hatchard’s , she is shopping at Lord Byron’s bookshop, a shop that has been at the same London address, catering to aristocratic poets and fancy ladies buying books for their friends in hospital since 1797. But when she thinks of having been to parties at Devonshire House, she is marking the passage of time: Devonshire House was demolished in 1924, after the novel’s 1923 setting but before its 1925 publication date.

Devonshire House is preserved in Clarissa’s memory, and her memory of it is another clue to her own coming obsolescence. Even the random details are not random. Joseph Breitkopf, who once taught Clarissa German but really prefers to sing lieder, shares his surname with the pre-eminent German music publisher . When Hugh consults a clock outside the fictional department store, Rigby & Lowndes, not only are R-I-G-B-Y (5) and L-O-W-N-D-E-S (7) precisely twelve characters, (one for each hour on the clock face), but they were the surnames of English suffragettes. In 1913, Edith Rigby threw a black pudding at a Labour MP in Manchester and set a bomb (which did not explode) under the Liverpool Cotton Exchange. Mary Lowndes was a stained glass artist and a regular contributor to the feminist magazine The Englishwoman. We still need to remember to take care of veterans and we still don’t do enough. When Clarissa hears of Septimus’ suicide, she retreats from her party. In a quiet room, she thinks about him with great sympathy and, in his death, finds courage to rejoin her life.

Many people find that moment, when she stands alone, looking across the way at the old woman opposite, one of the most beautiful moments in the novel. The novel depends on our conviction that, more than any of the other characters, Clarissa understands Septimus’ decision to end his life. And Woolf shows us to link that decision, arising out of despair, with the lack of sympathy Septimus faces, especially from his doctors. In the 1920’s, many people still looked on war trauma as cowardice and there was some support for treating suffering veterans as deserters. I don’t think it’s entirely satiric when the men harrumph, on the news of Septimus’ death, that 'there must be some provision in the Bill.' In the end, Woolf values Clarissa’s sympathy more, but I think Woolf shows us the decency in Richard’s actions, too. Septimus’ death is an offering and a statement, an act of desperation in the face of continued appalling medical care—in this moment, the prospect of being sent away from London and his wife. Woolf, who suffered from depression off and on throughout her life, knew too well what bad doctors could be.

In the 1920’s, the care Woolf endured—isolation, forced inactivity, over-feeding—was identical to what most shell-shock victims would have endured. Only a very, very few physicians, such as W. H. R. Rivers, had begun a talking cure as treatment for war trauma. For Woolf, suicide was a decision and could be a rational one. The only page that Woolf substantially changed in revising the page proofs is the page on which Septimus commits suicide. To that page, she added his thinking about how to do it: taking Mrs. Filmer’s bread knife into consideration—'mustn’t spoil that,' he thinks; wondering about gas and razors; embarrassed to have to throw himself out the heavy Bloomsbury lodging house window. Anne Fernald is the editor of Mrs. Dalloway for Cambridge University Press (forthcoming). She blogs at Fernham and teaches at Fordham's Lincoln Center campus.

Her personal website is at OpenStreetMap - from Westminster to Regent's Park Clarissa Dalloway's London Clarissa Dalloway's Westminster home is never precisely located - it seems to be in or around Great College Street, within a few minutes walk of Parliament and the major ministries. We first come across her in Dean's Yard, behind Westminster Abbey, and as she traverses central London, we see her crossing Victoria Street and entering St James's Park Westminster - map from 1917 A little later, Mrs Dalloway is walking along Piccadilly towards Bond Street - while on Piccadilly, she looks into Hatchard's, then as now a leading bookshop. Intersecting with Clarissa's walk is the journey of Septimus Warren Smith and his Italian wife, Rezia - they are in Bond Street, then in Regent's Park to the north, and later in Portland Place and on to Harley Street to see a leading doctor. Another medical man, Dr Holmes, comes to the Warren Smiths' home in Bloomsbury to take Septimus away to an institution - prompting the shell-shocked young war veteran to jump out of a window to his death. Other characters are plotted precisely as they walk ...

across Green Park - along Fleet Street - always within a fairly circumscribed area of central London, never more than a mile or so from Westminster Bridge. These paragraphs have been informed by the section 'A Walking Tour with Mrs Dalloway' in David Daiches and John Flower, Literary Landscapes of the British Isles, first published in 1979. And here's a brief extract: 'If one does not follow the topography of the novel one loses a great deal. Virginia Woolf's sense of London helps her to define the characters and her sense of the characters helps her to define London, to a greater degree than in any other of her novels. ... the London that really haunted her imagination was her own London, where she was born and grew up and spent so much of her life, the London which, as her diary shows, she rediscovered with excitement every time she came back to it after an absence.' Andrew Whitehead Publication History for Mrs. Dalloway Updated July 22, 1997 Created July 22, 1997 "As Woolf explained in a preface she wrote for the Modern Library edition of Mrs.

Dalloway published by Random House in 1928, her first conception of the novel involved only the character of Clarissa, who was either to commit suicide or otherwise die at the end of her party. A visit to Lady Ottoline Morrells home in June 1923 gave Woolf new ideas for the novel: A loathing overcomes me of human beings  their insincerity, their vanity  A wearisome and rather defiling talk with Ott. Last night is the foundation of this complaint I want to bring in the despicableness of people like Ott: I want to give the slipperiness of the soul  Soon after, Woolf wrote in her diary, I want to give life and death, sanity and insanity; I want to criticise the social system, and to show it at work, at its most intense." Mrs. Dalloway was published in Britain by the Hogarth Press on May 14, 1925 with a dust jacket designed by Vanessa Bell, and in the United States by Harcourt, Brace & Company on the same day, with the same dust jacket. (Mark Hussey.

Virginia Woolf: A-Z. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. 169-173.) Lecture 3 Basic Orientation to the Novel Mrs. Dalloway (1925) is one of Woolfï¿½s two most loved and most written-about novels, the other being To the Lighthouse (1925). Set on a single June day in 1923, the novel (MD for short) tracks the parallel lives of two very different Londoners, Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Warren Smith. Clarissa is a 51-year old socialite who is giving a party that night for her husband, Richard Dalloway, a Conservative member of Parliament. She moves in the upper reaches of British society (the prime minister will attend her party), but she is not a titled aristocrat, and she is thrilled about the prime ministerï¿½s actually showing up at the party. Woolf knew lots of people like Clarissa, though they were not among her best friends.

Most people say Woolf modeled Clarissa on Kitty Maxse (1867-1922), who had been a close friend of Woolfï¿½s two older sisters, Stella and Vanessa (see Mark Husseyï¿½s entry on Katherine Maxse in Virginia Woolf: A-Z). In the only introduction Woolf wrote for any of her novels, she says that she originally intended that Clarissa would die in the novel, perhaps by suicide (this is in the Modern Library edition published by Random House in 1928). At some point, she decided to create another character who would be the one to die. This new character was Septimus Warren Smith, a 30-year-old, shell-shocked WWI veteran whom we first meet in the street that Clarissa Dalloway is walking down (see p 14, responding to the motorcar that backfires). Septimus is with his Italian wife Rezia, who is worried about his increasingly erratic behavior and is trying to get him to a doctor.

Septimus works in an office, where he is doing well and seems to have a promising career, but he has begun to have delusions and flashbacks to seeing his friend Evans killed in battle, and he doesnï¿½t trust the doctors who are treating him. This character allows Woolf to explore some aspects of madness that she had experienced herself, and also to condemn war and the false patriotism she associates with it. Here is how she describes what she was after in her diary at the place where she first mentions Septimusï¿½ name: Mrs. Dalloway has branched into a book [she published a short story, ï¿½Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street,ï¿½ in 1923]; and I adumbrate here a study of insanity and suicide; the world seen by the sane and the insane side by side--something like that. Septimus Smith? is that a good name? (Diary, vol.

2, October 14, 1922, p 207) The following summer, she write this about her intentions in the novel: I want to give life and death, sanity and insanity; I want to criticise the social system, and to show it at work, at its most intense. (Diary, vol. 2, June 19, 1923, p 248) Paralleling Clarissa and Septimus thus allows Woolf to play out a range of themes, while exploring the big topics that obsess her in all her works, namely love, death, and the meaning of life. Mrs. Dalloway and Joyceï¿½s Ulysses In setting her novel on a single day in a city in June in a city through which various characters walk while we listen in on their thought, Woolf is obviously alluding to Joyceï¿½s Ulysses, which had been published in 1922 and which she was reading that summer that Mrs. Dalloway began to take shape.

Ulysses is set on June 16, 1904, in Dublin, and is told primarily through the thoughts of two main characters, Leopold Bloom and Stephen Daedalus, whose lives intersect in complicated ways. Daedalus is a young man much like Joyce himself, and Bloom may be seen as a father figure for him. Woolf didnï¿½t much like Ulysses, or at least didnï¿½t appreciate what Joyce was after (see her diary entries for August 26 and September 3 and 6, 1922), perhaps because it is such a ï¿½masculinistï¿½ novel in which women are seen primarily as sexual, reproductive beings about whom the male characters obsess. (Woolf doesnï¿½t say this in her diary that summer.

She just says itï¿½s ï¿½pretentious,ï¿½ ï¿½very obscure, ï¿½tricky,ï¿½ and that a good writer doesnï¿½t get so into ï¿½doing stunts.ï¿½ Iï¿½m inferring the feminist critique from my own prejudices!) But something about the structure must have struck a chord with her, perhaps somehow giving her license to indulge her gift for detail. Or perhaps she (unconsciously?) decided to show him how a great writer would address major themes in a novel set on a single day and following several charactersï¿½ peregrinations around a city. Ulysses is written on a grand scale, a huge book that indulges Joyceï¿½s love of word play and multiple levels of literary allusion, the primary one being to Homerï¿½s Odyssey. Mrs. Dalloway is a short book (under 200 pages), but a very rich one, a book in which small incidents reverberate (and sometimes recur) with meaning.

Parts of it may test our understanding on a first reading (who is the Septimus Warren Smith and what is he doing in this book??), but it is not obscure. Once you grasp that Septimus is a doppelganger or double for Clarissa, then things begin to open up as you look at them in comparison to each other. Most of what can be learned from this novel can be learned directly from what is one the page, requiring little or no recourse to literary allusion to narratives outside the novel, unlike Ulysses, which cannot fully be understood without a key. This is not to say that scholars havenï¿½t dug out some pretty obscure allusions in Mrs. Dalloway, including the source of the song sung by the old woman begging in the street (ï¿½ee um fah um so,ï¿½ MD 82; see Hillis Miller, ï¿½Repetition as the Raising of the Deadï¿½). But the novel is not deliberately obscure, but rather in some respects may at first appear deceptively simple. Several narrative events (e.g., the car that backfires in Bond St.) link Clarissa and Septimus, although the characters never meet.

In addition, two Shakespearean quotations link the two characters. The first is ï¿½Fear no more the heat oï¿½ the sun, Nor the furious winterï¿½s rageï¿½ (Cymbeline) Clarissa sees these lines in a book open in a bookstore window (p 9) and then thinks of them again on pp 30 and 39. Septimus think of the quotation on p 139, and then after Clarissa hears about his suicide, she thinks of it again and feels connected to him: ï¿½and the words came to her, Fear no more the heat of the sun. . . . She felt somehow very like him. . . . She felt glad he had done it; thrown it away. The clock was striking. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. He made her feel the beauty; made her feel the funï¿½ (MD 186). The second Shakespearean quotation is in Clarissaï¿½s thoughts in that same scene when she is reflecting on Septimusï¿½ death (MD 184): But this young man who had killed himselfï¿½had he plunged holding his treasure?

ï¿½If it were now to die, ï¿½twere now to be most happy,ï¿½she had said to herself once, coming down in white. The quote is from Othello ( II.i.187-88), spoken by Othello to Desdemona when they are reunited at Cyprus, before their troubles begin. Clarissa recalls thinking of it during that summer houseparty at Bourton 33 years ago when she was 18 and enamored of Sally Seton (p 35), the same houseparty where she met Richard Dalloway, whom she chose over the more emotional and romantic suitor Peter Walsh. At Bourton, it was herself she imagined dying happy, not for the love of Peter or Richard, but for lovely Sally Seton, who on the next page kisses her one the lips. These love relationships of the pastï¿½who loves whom, who marries whom, what difference it makesï¿½are the substance of Clarissaï¿½s life, a life that she now fears is meaningless and wasted.

The scene in which Clarissa meditates on Septimusï¿½ death and sees herself connected to him through the quotation about dying happy (184) and not fearing the heat of the sun (186), leads her to break through the ï¿½leaden circlesï¿½ that Big Ben has been sending through the novel on the hour; ï¿½he [Septimus] made her feel the beauty; made her feel the funï¿½ (186). Life is beautiful, life is ugly. Sally Seton is now a stout, titled matron with five sons she canï¿½t stop talking about. You might say that thinking of Septimusï¿½ death has given Clarissa what Woolf elsewhere calls a ï¿½moment of being,ï¿½ moments in which one feels intensely connected to life, to the moment. The remembered coming down the stairs at Bourton was another such moment. These intense moments of connectedness are central to Woolfï¿½s artistic vision, to what she was continually seeking in her writing.

Later she would describe the quest as a fin glimpsed far out in a waste of water (see The Waves, 189, 245, 273, 284). Itï¿½s the whole grasped all at once in all its beauty and ugliness. The notion of connectedness, and especially of characters connected to each other at some deep level, is related to at least two narrative techniques that Woolf was experimenting with in Mrs. Dalloway, free indirect discourse and ï¿½tunneling.ï¿½ Free indirect discourse is a term scholars use to describe the way narrative point of view shifts in novels like Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse. Itï¿½s a modification of two standard modes of discourse we all use: direct discourse: Mrs. Dalloway said, ï¿½Iï¿½ll by the flowers myself.ï¿½ indirect discourse: Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. In direct discourse, the speakerï¿½s words are usually quoted and the speaker is directly identified. In indirect discourse, someone else is speaking, perhaps paraphrasing what someone else has said.

The technique of indirect discourse becomes free indirect discourse (FID) when an author weaves a characterï¿½s thoughts into the narrative in such a way that it is hard to tell whether they are the characterï¿½s thoughts, someone elseï¿½s thoughts about the character, or the narratorï¿½s comments. In a single passage, such as the opening page of Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf may quickly shift from one characterï¿½s perspective to another. This technique tends to destabilize the authority of the ï¿½omniscient narrator,ï¿½ which can be read as a male perspective and which Woolf increasingly rejects. In this way, Woolf allows us into charactersï¿½ minds as though we were disembodied spirits, which in some respects we are when we are reading literature. (For more on FID, see Kathy Mezeiï¿½s ï¿½Who is Speaking Here?ï¿½ in Ambiguous Discourse, 1996.) Hillis Miller discusses this same narrative strategy in Mrs. Dalloway (see his ï¿½Repetition As the Raising of the Deadï¿½), but does not call it FID.

Instead, he links it to what Woolf called ï¿½tunneling.ï¿½ Miller claims that (in the words of the bibliography annotation) ï¿½by going deeply into each [characterï¿½s] mind, there is a point when the mind of one character and the minds of all characters become one.ï¿½ The term ï¿½tunnelingï¿½ comes from two diary entries written while Woolf was writing Mrs. Dalloway (which then had the working title The Hours): I have no time to describe my plans. I should say a good deal about The Hours, & my discovery; how I dig out beautiful caves behind my characters; I think that gives exactly what I want; humanity, humour, depth. The idea is that the caves shall connect, & each comes to daylight at the present moment "The idea is that the caves shall connect, & each comes to daylight at the present moment" (my emphasis, Diary, vol. 1, August 30, 1923, p 263) I am stuffed with ideas for it [Mrs. Dalloway]. I feel I can use up everything Iï¿½ve ever thought.

Certainly, Iï¿½m less coerced than Iï¿½ve yet been. The doubtful point is, I think, the character of Mrs. Dalloway. It may be too stiff, too glittering and tinselly. But then I can bring innumerable other characters to her support. I wrote the 100th page today. Of course, I've only been feeling my way into it--up till last August anyhow. It took me a year's groping to discover what I call my tunnelling process, by which I tell the past by installments, as I have need of it. This is my prime discovery so far. (my emphasis, Diary, vol. 2, October 15, 1923, p 272) Mrs. Dallowayï¿½s London Woolf had begun writing Mrs. Dalloway as early as 1922, two years before she returned to Bloomsbury in May 1924, and she finished it that summer at her country home, Monkï¿½s House, in Rodmell, Sussex. So she did only the final editing while actually living in central London.

Yet it is her most London novel, the one in which she most vividly brings the city to life by recreating a day in June 1923 in various parts of central London, especially Westminster, where Clarissa Dalloway lives, and Regentï¿½s Park, where several of Septimus Warren Smithï¿½s scenes are laid. Woolf gives us so much detail about the various characters walks through London that we can easily trace their steps, as we will do. But what is the point of this detail? Woolf is hardly writing a travel guide. One answer to that is that the geographic details, together with the striking of Big Ben, ground the novel in material reality, giving it a shape that allows readers to follow the charactersï¿½ thoughts very far from that material reality. On a symbolic level, Woolf invests various geographic detail with heavy significance.

Some of this symbolic significance rests in the things themselves, notably Big Ben, the enormous bell in a clock tower, which is universally a symbol for London and for British Government, standing as it does at the houses of Parliament (the Palace of Westminster; see more about Big Ben at ) Jean Moorcroft Wilson points out how Woolf uses external scenes in London to reflect the charactersï¿½ internal reality (see pp 125-126 re MD). She illustrates with quotations about Clarissa on Bond Street (see p 11, beginning with ï¿½Bond Street fascinated herï¿½) and Septimus in Regentï¿½s Park (see p 69, beginning with ï¿½He had only to open his eyesï¿½). Wilson also comments on how Woolf uses objects in external reality as a narrative technique to switch from one characterï¿½s mind to another (see Wilson pp 131-133), as when she shifts from Septimus and Rezia viewing the mysterious motorcar that backfired in Bond Street, to the mind of Clarissa, thinking ï¿½it is probably the Queenï¿½ (see p 16).

This is one of the narrative techniques that the film The Hours imitates very beautifully with photography. Wilson also comments on how London has mystical significance for Woolf. Seeing the city as somehow the center of life, itï¿½s also a source of creative energy and access to that illusive thing (the ï¿½fin in a waste of waterï¿½) that Woolf sought. Wilson quotes a passage from Woolfï¿½s diary for 1915, about how being is London is ï¿½being on the highest crest of the biggest waveï¿½right in the centre & swim of thingsï¿½ (qtd Wilson 136, from Diary, vol. 1, p 10). Clarissa Dalloway has a similar vision of London scenes providing a sense of immortality. Here is how she thinks of the London streets she is walking: what she loved was this, here, now, in front of her; the fat lady in the cab.

Did it matter then, she asked herself, walking towards Bond Street, did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely; all this must go on without her; did she resent it; or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely? but that somehow in the streets of London, on the ebb and flow of things, here, there, she survived, Peter survived, lived in each other, she being part, she was positive, of the trees at home; of the house there, ugly, rambling all to bits and pieces as it was; part of people she had never met; being laid out like a mist between the people she knew best, who lifted her on their branches as she had seen the trees lift the mist, but it spread ever so far, her life, herself. (MD 9) London streets, trees, ordinary housesï¿½these are a part of herself and of all the people who have passed through them, and in so doing live on. In Mrs.

Dalloway, those London street scenesï¿½and the charactersï¿½ meditations on themï¿½are key to the theme of relatedness and connection, to the meaning of life (and death), and the reason why it is worthwhile to just go on living.

Question: Who wrote the 1925 novel Mrs Dalloway?
Answer: Virginia Woolf